Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Top Ten Cleantech Incentives in the US

The list shows some of the major issues that our incentive environment currently has: We're mixing incentives for energy generation, energy conservation, clean technology development and job creation.

Five of the ten incentives listed by cleantechies are mixing efficiency and generation project. None of them expressively address job creation in the renewable energy sector, the only one touching it is the recovery act.

An additional difficulty that we noticed discussing the article in our team is accessibility for small and mid size companies that still provide for the majority of jobs in the US. We need to get better on how to make sure that the job generating entrepreneurs in the US get a quick overview and a fast access to those incentives rather than work through complicated application procedures for years until they have an actual benefit.

Nevertheless the overall sum of all incentives going into the solar portion of the green sector is nowhere close to what the Chinese government has been doing over the past years and continues to invest with the explicit focus on generation businesses in the first step and reduce the carbon footprint in a second step.